Spinoza was right. There is only one substance. The problem, then, is what is the substance? It can't be 'matter' because matter is a creature of perception. While there is undoubtedly an external world, how we perceive it is a function of the self-separation which is the necessary condition of self-awareness. Cause, inertia and abstraction are all determined by the moment of self-separation. Causality suggests that inertia is essentially 'external', but causality itself is a function of the separative moment. All experience is causative because all perception is volitional. Sensation is unrelated 'bits' of elemental information. Only an act of consciousness can assemble it. But, while the form of 'matter' is determined by the structure of consciousness and perception, there is still obviously something 'independent' that is 'out there'. Therefore the substance can't be consciousness as awareness. Consciousness does not 'create' the world.
            Spinoza defined the world of experience in terms of the 'two modes' of the 'one substance', the modes of 'thought' and 'extension'. But, when we understand self-awareness, we understand that space, as a perceptual ground, and abstract thought are both also consequences of reflective awareness. Therefore, in the present instance, we must redefine the substance as the amalgam of consciousness and the world. What shows us that consciousness and the world are one substance is evolution itself. The fact that evolution eventuates in consciousness means that consciousness was inherent or implicit in substance from the first. If the substance has two modes, probably we should define them as the evolutionary and the ontological. Time, as we experience it, is a perceptual construct, a tacit analytical category that arises as the spontaneous corollary of the self-separation that allows us to witness ourselves and our actions. This self-separation is prior to our present mode of perception. But evolution is an 'objective' presentation that, while it presupposes 'time' in some sense, does not require the perceptual structure of the experiential moment for its validity. But the nature of solipsism, of the universal subjectivity of our experience, precludes us from assigning 'being' to the evolutionary. All 'being' is necessarily derived from the immediacy of the moment of experience, the actuality of the present, which, being the only actuality in time, is the only source of 'the real'. Therefore, consciousness is the 'ontological' mode of the substance, the source point for the determination of 'being' or 'the real'.
            The materialists are going through contortions trying to prove that matter 'creates' consciousness. But consciousness cannot be created any more than matter can. The mutual conversion of matter and energy within the framework of a self-contained universe finds its corollary in the spontaneity of value response within the 'empty ground' of awareness. In its spontaneous base, 'experience' cannot be 'caused', because 'cause' is a subsidiary function of experience. And this is not simply sophistry. The evolutionary first order of 'experience' is spontaneous value response, a spontaneity of response that persist up through the evolutionary sequence of animal development until we arrive at the human, at which point we enter the sphere of secondary response awareness, the self-awareness of the human with its proto-abstractive perception of 'objects' within a context of 'time' and 'space', a field in which the witness is also aware of a subsistent 'self'. Prior to self-awareness, it is not possible that value response can be anything other than spontaneous. Therefore it is essentially prior to 'time' and 'space', since time and space, as we experience them are structured abstractions. The fact that in the first order of self-awareness - before the 'abstraction of abstraction' through philosophy - the structured experience of time and space appears automatically does not obviate their essentially abstract and reflexive basis. They are the necessary conditions of self-awareness and automatically arise with it, just like the formal basis for 'objects', which is also essentially abstract.
            And, of course, even after self-awareness, basic value response remains spontaneous, although every value response now immediately engenders the habitual or secondary interpretive response that presents the original value as an 'objective' phenomena of consciousness, whether 'internal' or 'external'.

            The materialists, in their hunger for an atheism that denies any god, including awareness itself, insist that the mechanically reactive process of 'nature' as 'purely material' can produce a sophistication more profound than human thought, as if this disproved the basic validity or independence of consciousness as a phenomenon in itself. But what it simply proves is that consciousness is integral in 'matter'. Awareness is prior to thought. Awareness involves the spontaneity of value response. In the evolutionary process, the spontaneity of value response clearly begins with volitional response in protoplasm. Undoubtedly this spontaneous value response is more sophisticated than 'thought', since 'thought' is the abstractive process of consciousness that produces the reflective interpretation, the structured world of secondary experience that we assume is primary because it is the only experiential field in which the 'self' is consciously present. But, as a secondary and abstractive process, 'thought' can in no way compete with the immediacy of response - the immediacy of value response - that is apparently present from the moment that protoplasmic development reaches the stage in which tissue can respond to its environment, and perhaps before. Perhaps even the first virus-like molecules of organic matter express this same potency.
            Or perhaps the pre-molecular and pre-atomic particles express this same reality. Isn't this what we are seeing in the sub-atomic behavior we call 'quantum phenomena'?

- Jeremy